Life Hacks: Making Your Future Self Happy

When I was in high school, I knew that I was a teenager and that teenagers were stupid. I knew that their brains were basically a construction zone complete with hazard signs and pitfalls and electrical connections that weren't hooked up properly yet.

So I decided that the best way to make decisions was to not let my teenage self make decisions. Instead, I invented a hack. I decided to live not in the way that would make my teenage self happy; I decided to live in a way that would make my thirty-year-old self happy.

I imagined that thirty-year-old self and what she'd be like and thought, "what will she wish she'd done when she was my age?" Or, honestly, adolescence being what it is, I thought, "what will she wish she hadn't done when she was my age?"

How did it work? Honestly, now that I'm in my thirties, I can look back and say: it worked pretty well. It kept me from very basic disasters like getting pregnant or getting arrested, and it also put me in a good position to handle college academics and not go into debt (because I worked hard at school and at my job. Because I had a job.) It kept me close to the Lord.

So, though I can look back and say, a bit fondly, Idiot, of some of my teenage thoughts and feelings and actions, honestly, I'm very grateful to that young girl who took her adult self seriously enough to safeguard way before she was in possession of her.

And now that I've reached the once-far-away-land of my thirties, I find myself more and more thinking of my forty-five-year-old self. And my sixty-year-old self. And even a little, if God grants me years, of the happy woman I hope to be in my nineties.

What will those women want? What will those women hope that their thirty-year-old self did? And didn't do?

I know for sure that that forty-five-year-old Jess will want most to have done a good job mothering her kids and wiving her husband and following her Lord. Mostly she'll want to have had a solid fifteen years in relationship with those few most important people. And then a few important others. After that, she will want a lot of novels under her belt. Just, you know, a decade and a half of solid work.  I don't think she'll care if she's in the best shape of her life, but she'll want a body in shape enough that it's a help and not a hindrance in her daily life. She'll want to have been kind. She'll want me to not have wasted my time.

That's what I've got after just a few minutes of thinking about it. I want to think about it more in these waning weeks of the year, because it could use some refinement.

But I recommend it to you as a useful technique for even the smallest decisions of life. In the morning, when you're having trouble deciding what to do first, ask yourself what your evening self will want done, in those few precious hours after the kids are in bed and before you are. On Monday, ask yourself what your Saturday self will hope your week looked like. At the beginning of Lent, what your Easter self will be glad to have read and thought and prayed.

And ask it a few decades out too. I promise you'll find it illuminating.

In the End, it is all about our Easter selves.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell